


One for Sorrow, Two for Mirth

by icenineporcupine



Category: World of Warcraft
Genre: Angst and Humor, Bird Symbolism, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Laughter During Sex, M/M, Oral Sex, Tattoos, highly questionable bird puns, the tonal equivalent of a goblin rocketway
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-02-23
Updated: 2021-02-23
Packaged: 2021-03-13 10:09:22
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,328
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29649741
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/icenineporcupine/pseuds/icenineporcupine
Summary: A simple story of a sailor and a spy, and thirteen little birds that bind them.
Relationships: Flynn Fairwind/Mathias Shaw, Mathias Shaw/Edwin VanCleef (mentioned) - Relationship
Comments: 9
Kudos: 41





	One for Sorrow, Two for Mirth

**Author's Note:**

> There's an old rhyme/superstition about magpies that goes something like this:
> 
> _One for sorrow,  
>  Two for mirth.  
> Three for a funeral,  
> Four for a birth.  
> Five for heaven,  
> Six for hell,  
> Seven a secret never to tell.  
> Eight for a wish,  
> Nine for a kiss,  
> Ten a surprise you ought not to miss.  
> Eleven for health,  
> Twelve for wealth,  
> Thirteen beware it’s the reaper himself._

Mathias had a bit of a fixation with Flynn’s collarbones. 

After Flynn had discovered that he possessed some rare and _definitely_ magical ability to lay hands on the Spymaster of Stormwind without getting sliced from bow to stern, he’d done what he imagined any diligent mage would do: fully test the limits of his newfound power. 

That meant being as handsy as humanly possible— while still being a respectful gentleman, of course. 

Results had been mixed. Mathias had responded with everything from belligerent hissing to what they’d both agreed was the best sex of their lives. A vast spectrum, but one well worth the continued gamble, in Flynn’s humble opinion. 

More relevantly, this was how Flynn noticed his lover’s little obsession. Whenever he embraced the man, nine times out of ten Mathias responded by nosing-aside the neckline of Flynn’s shirt and pressing kisses to his clavicle. 

It was an unexpectedly gentle habit for a creature better known for pressing knives into spleens, but Flynn chalked most of it up to logistics. Mat wasn’t _tiny_ by any means, but Flynn still had more than half-a-head on him, and that fact alone made his collarbones a bit of a target. 

And that was fine. 

… It was just that… well… when it came to Mathias, Flynn’s lips loved _everything._ He’d never found another creature quite so compelling in all his life, and he’d devoted entire evenings and mornings to proving it, without asking for all that much in return. He knew how damned lucky he was to have Mathias at all, and happily cherished any and all of the man’s subtle and slightly sideways affection… 

He just couldn’t help but sometimes wish Mathias would spread things out a bit better. 

… Alright, so maybe that wasn’t the right turn of phrase either. 

Flynn sighed and let his head fall back against the pillows with a thump. 

Mathias was actually spread out quite decadently across Flynn’s lap just then, disrobed down to his freckles and rutting against him with uncommonly indulgent laziness. They were tucked away in Mathias’ tiny cabin in the highlands, and the light of an oil lamp licked molten highlights through his copper locks, and along the lean lines of his body as he moved. It reminded Flynn of the way Arathi sunsets ignited the rolling edges of the mountains. He looked like he might burn anything that dared to touch him, but Flynn had always been a reckless fool, and had no intention of growing wiser. 

He smoothed his hands up the strong muscle of his lover’s thighs and teased his fingertips along the cleft of his ass, chasing the goosebumps that raced up the sides of his ribcage. 

_Tides, you’ve ruined me,_ Flynn thought. He couldn’t even keep track of all the absolutely wild things he wanted to do to the man in his arms: a million fantasies that flickered and danced in his head like the lamplight… 

_Mathias,_ however, seemed perfectly content to just keep kissing his damned collarbones. And that was the crux of the issue, wasn’t it? He was more attached than a babe to its mother’s nipple, and Flynn couldn’t figure it out for the life of him. 

“Mat,” he begged, finally, when the rasp of Mathias’ whiskers against his skin had strayed well over the complicated border between pleasure and pain. “You know I love you something fierce, but my mouth’s north and my cock is south...” 

Mathias abruptly sat up, and the hot press of his mouth vanished, leaving only the aftermath: a smattering of bruises and bite marks and beard-burn. Flynn winced. That skin hadn’t felt so bloody raw since— 

—since he’d last gotten it tattooed. Years ago. 

With a pair of swallows. 

_Birds._

“They’re not accurate, you know,” Mathias said, scowling down at his chest. 

Tidemother be damned.

 _“Really,_ Mat?! _”_ Flynn pulled a hand down his face, giggling at the ceiling. He wasn’t sure whether to be more bewildered by the discovery that his sweetheart had a secret tattoo fetish, or by the fact that he was apparently about to receive his, what— fiftieth? hundredth?—lecture about birds, and this time _in bed._

“They’re not accurate!” Mathias repeated, tensely. “Ornithologically—”

“You would know, wouldn’t you?” Flynn cut him off, grinning broadly. “You _are_ the head of the _horny-though-logical_ society, after all.” 

“That’s not what it—” Mathias cut himself off with a huff, no doubt realizing by the way Flynn had used the word that he knew exactly what it meant. His jaw twitched and the tendons of his neck flushed a rosy red, a sure tell that he was mortified and using caginess to compensate. “You’re _relentlessly_ agonizing.” 

“Only because you give me so much to work with!” Flynn teased, caressing his hips suggestively as Mathias glared at him. “What?!” he laughed again, “That was a _compliment_ , you daft little bird.” The pet name pulled the blush from Mathias’ neck into his cheeks and ears, and Flynn’s heart soared. “Tides, what am I going to do with you?”

Flynn swept up and captured Mathias in his arms, dragging him back down against his chest and kissing him soundly. Mathias struggled halfheartedly in his embrace, entirely for show, and only for a moment. 

“Tell me all about your little friends on my chest, and how _insufferably_ wrong they are,” Flynn whispered into his ear, still grinning as he nibbled the lobe in his teeth. 

“It doesn’t matter,” Mathias muttered, his face still scalding. “Let’s just drop this…” 

“Hmm, I’d rather not,” Flynn replied, nudging his nose and kissing him again. “Not sure if you’ve realized but I’m kinda _crazy_ about you, Mat. And apparently _you’re_ kinda crazy about my _tats_. And that means that I’m now obligated to be kinda crazy about them too… in a totally not-weird, non-narcissistic way, of course— _”_

Mathias kissed him—mostly to shut him up, in all likelihood— then sighed and shifted until he’d nestled himself against Flynn’s side. 

“They’re not _wrong…”_ Mathias clarified. He traced the faded feathers of the bird above Flynn’s heart, and Flynn propped an arm behind his head to watch. “They’re just… chimaeras. Each one has the forked tail and the plumage of a swallow, but the wing silhouette of a swift. It’s a common mistake. They’re quite similar, and share the same habitats. We could probably find some of each around here, and I could show you the difference…” 

His fingertips ghosted against a red mark he’d left with his mouth, and Flynn shuddered with the sting and the softness of it, biting down on his own lip. 

“I’m frankly shocked that they resemble real birds at all,” he admitted, playing in Mathias’ hair. “They’re sailors' tattoos. Barely more than a rubber stamp. Strip the shirt off any old scallywag with sea legs and I reckon you’ll find at least one of these little birds. That’s _not_ a suggestion, by the way…” he added, when Mathias appeared to be lost in contemplation. “Tides, I probably shouldn’t’ve told you that. Now you’re gonna leave me for some bloke with a fancier bird.” 

Mathias snorted and turned his face toward the palm of Flynn’s hand, kissing it. 

“Don’t be ridiculous,” he whispered. 

“‘Fraid I don’t know how to be much else, love,” Flynn replied. 

Mathias smiled and shook his head, but his mirth yielded once again to melancholy as his gaze fell back upon Flynn’s tattoos. Flynn had the sense that there was something else he _desperately_ wanted to say about them. A couple months traveling the continent together had taught Flynn a fair amount about his lover’s old wounds— possibly more than Mathias had meant to reveal. It had also taught him that, for all his detailed reports and quick ripostes, Mathias always struggled for the words to describe the things that mattered most to him. 

Flynn took his hand and brought it briefly to his lips, then let it fall back against his chest. He stared up at the wood beams of the ceiling, content enough for the moment to just lie there, holding him. 

“Each one’s supposed to commemorate five thousand nautical miles,” he elaborated, if only to spare Mathias the pressure to speak. “Got my second one a little over three years ago, now. But depending on what port you’re in and who you ask, they can take on other meanings too. The oldest superstitions say they grant sailors safe passage—either back to home port, or to the Tidemother…”

The truth of the matter was that Flynn hadn’t ever put much thought into their greater meaning. He’d been drunk when he’d gotten the first one, and barely more than an adolescent. He’d gotten the second one because he already had the first. 

But Mathias had given meaning to all sorts of mundane things that Flynn had never bothered to think twice about, starting with a blade of grass. And the more evenings he spent watching Mathias whittle formless hunks of wood into darling little birds, the more he began to wonder whether the man was quietly doing the same to Flynn’s whole life: carving away the ambivalence and revealing the beautiful details that had been hiding away all along… 

“We had swallows, and swifts… back in Westfall…” said Mathias, finally. “They’d fly between the fences in the fields and sing…” He swallowed, thickly. “Baros and Edwin and I… we’d always end up arguing about which were which…” 

Ah. It was that wound, then. 

Mathias was quiet even by his own standards about the two men he called his best friends. But silence could say a lot, if one paid enough attention to its edges—where it stopped and started, and all the things that tried and failed to fill it. People tended to assume Flynn talked a lot because he didn’t understand silence, when the truth was he talked because he understood it a little too well. 

Baros and Edwin were dead, neither one taken gently. And one of them had been far more than a friend. 

He pulled Mathias closer and dropped a kiss on his head. 

“Let me guess,” he teased, trying to thread the needle between pathos and levity. “They were always wrong, and you were always right…?” 

“... I like that yours are both,” Mathias replied instead. “I know it’s silly, but… the first time I noticed them, I…” he swallowed again, and the rest of the words barely escaped. “Nothing had felt so right to me in the _longest time…”_

“Oh, _Mat…”_ Flynn murmured, blinking back the wetness that suddenly threatened his eyes.

“It’s fine,” Mathias insisted, quietly. “I didn’t mean to make such a mountain out of it—”

He trailed off as Flynn hauled him back up his body, bringing them nose to nose. 

“Well, the _good_ news is that I’ve got two.” 

“... What?” Mathias’ brows pressed together uncertainly. 

“A bird for each of ‘em— Barry and Eddie! They weren’t sailors, but maybe my little misfits can give their souls a safe homecoming anyway, yeah…?” 

Mathias went absolutely rigid in his arms, and Flynn watched as a hundred expressions cascaded across his face— a thousand—like every emotion the stoic man had ever bottled was escaping from him at once. 

“Flynn…” His eyes were broken glass gleaming at him from the bottom of a tide pool. 

“That’s me,” he confirmed, caressing Mathias’ face with a smile. “Waiting for you to tell me which bird is which, though—” 

“Light, _stop…”_ Mathias whispered, pressing his eyes shut, and sending a tear trickling around Flynn’s thumb on his cheek. “That’s not even remotely fair to you…” 

“No? Why’s that?” Flynn asked. 

“They’re _your_ tattoos, Flynn. Your story. Your _body._ Not some damned ode to… ” He cut himself off with a sharp breath. “... to all my ghosts.” 

“I told you, love, they’re standard sailor fodder—no different than the ink on a hundred other hides. Before ten minutes ago, I’d all but forgotten I had them.” Flynn rubbed soothingly at the sides of his waist. “ _You’re_ the one that’s gone and given them a story. They’re yours now, and I want you to have them. Tides, I’d cover this salty canvas of mine in a whole bloody _murder_ of crows for you, Mat. One for every scar you’ve ever suffered…” 

Mathias’ face twisted in a grimace. 

“Why would you _ever_ want to carry around all my scars…” 

“Because, as it turns out, that’s how I get the pleasure of seeing you _free_ of them…” Flynn replied, brushing his fingers up the back of Mathias’ neck. “I’m a bit of a pleasure-seeking fiend, you know. It’s _really_ not that complicated.” 

Mathias laughed, breathless and jagged like Flynn had punched it out of him. It ranked high on the list of most lovely noises Flynn had ever heard. 

He leaned up and pressed a soft kiss to Mathias’ mouth, and Mathias _crumbled_ over him like a ruin, smothering and disorganized. His hands and lips were suddenly everywhere, _everywhere—_ delicate but dangerously hot, like phoenix feathers dragging over his body, and _oh, tides,_ this was what Flynn had been after all along. Just this. Just Mathias, uninhibited and visceral and _vulnerable,_ and _his._

“I meant what I said before,” Flynn persisted. His lips latched onto the pulse at Mathias’ throat. “I’m bloody _crazy_ about you...” Mathias shuddered and Flynn swore he felt it in his own spine. He fumbled between their bodies for Mathias’ half-hard cock and his own, stroking them together and reveling in the way they quickly filled out in his hand, and the barely audible, barely coherent praise that flooded from Mathias’ taciturn lips. He was blushing from his hairline down into his chest. “Tides, you’re _so gorgeous,_ Mat. Never been so damned done-for in all my life. But I really have to ask you something…”

 _“Mmm?”_ The reply was somewhere between a hum and a moan. Flynn took it for permission. 

_“…_ do I need to ink a cock on my cock to get you to suck me off?”

He watched Mathias' gaze snap from hazy to horrified, and grinned. 

“Don’t get me wrong. For you, I’d do it. But I’m hoping the fact that it’s a _cock_ might be enough for you...” 

Mathias sat up again and dragged a hand over his face. 

_“Relentlessly. Agonizing,”_ he balked. 

Flynn just laughed, then groaned delightedly as Mathias kissed a trail down his torso and settled between his legs. 

He went down on Flynn with the same sort of hyperfixated devotion as before, though Flynn had to admit his cock appreciated the attention at _least_ twice as much as his collarbones had. It took Mathias a bit of finessing to get Flynn’s entire length in his mouth, but he managed it, and moreover seemed nearly as thrilled about it as Flynn was, if his little moan and the flush of his cheeks were anything to go by. 

“Bloody tides, you’re _so brilliant,”_ Flynn exulted, reaching down to stroke Mathias’ throat while it was full of him, then fisting a hand in his cropped hair until he’d made a mess of it. Mathias hollowed his cheeks and pulled off, then took him immediately back down until his bangs tickled Flynn’s stomach. If the man had a gag reflex, he suppressed it as thoroughly as everything else, bobbing to keep burying Flynn’s cockhead in the heat of his tonsils. Flynn tangled his legs around him adoringly, toes curling as tight as the pleasure in the cradle of his hips.

“So good! So, s- _ohh_ , _Mathias!”_ he moaned, unraveling far quicker than he’d intended to, but the evening had been a bit all over the map, so he resolved not to feel too guilty about it. Especially not when Mathias wedged a pair of fingers into his mouth beside Flynn’s cock, then stroked them behind his balls. _“Fuck!_ Mattie, I’m gonna … gonna come…” he gasped, “... wait, wait… hold up… gotta ask you… one last thing… please…” 

_“Ngk,”_ Mathias said around him, and Flynn gazed down his body to find his lover glaring up at him through his lashes, like he already knew exactly what Flynn was about to say… 

He grinned triumphantly. 

“... swift or swallow?” 

The threat of murder in Mathias’ glazed green eyes was all it took to send Flynn tumbling over the edge. 

He’d never come while also shattering into giggles, and the combination was kind of mind-blowing. Kind of _totally perfect._ But not _quite_ as perfect as the way Mathias swallowed him down to the root and milked him for every drop. 

_“... fuck.”_ he whispered, shivering as he gradually came back to himself. “That was _incredible…”_

Mathias pulled off with a lewd little noise and wiped a hand across his scowling mouth.

“That was…” He cleared his throat, gasped for a breath and tried again. He sounded as wrecked as his moustache looked. “That was literally the worst thing anyone has ever said to me.” 

“Wow. Can’t spell _dramatic_ without _Mat_ , I guess...” 

“Light, _how_ did I fall in love with you?” 

“How _did_ you?” Flynn continued to tease, even as he all but drowned in the afterglow. Of course he knew, he _knew_ Mathias loved him. There was barely anything the man did that didn’t scream it. But he so rarely just _said so._

The scowl lasted for approximately another half-second before Mathias was hiding his face in Flynn’s stomach and shaking with defeated laughter. Flynn reached down to pet the back of his head as best he could while boneless. 

_“You’ve ruined me, Fairwind…”_ He felt Mathias whisper against his skin better than he heard it, and smiled. 

“Not yet I haven’t, but you’d better get up here if you want me to before I doze…” 

And with that, he gathered Mathias under the arms and dragged him back up the bed.

— 

Hours later, as the dawn began to skulk across the cabin walls, Flynn lay awake, restless but unable to move—or just unwilling— as Mathias snoozed with an arm and leg tossed possessively across his body. His snore rumbled periodically into Flynn’s shoulder like the purr of a satisfied cat. His come had dried across Flynn’s belly hours ago. It should have been uncomfortable. Somehow it wasn’t. 

He could count the number of times this had happened on one hand. On one finger, actually. This was the first. Usually, Flynn was the one snoring obliviously while Mathias lay awake beside, plagued by work or nightmares or both. 

No nightmares troubled Flynn, just racing thoughts. At sea, the constant rolling of his ship let him shrug off all the things that otherwise seemed to cling. Or maybe the salt air kept his head clear. He wasn’t sure. Here in the highlands, though, his mind constantly seemed to spiral toward vertigo when he couldn’t find a distraction…

Mathias was so different. Flynn could see plainly how the snug walls of the cabin steadied him, and how cataloging all the various Arathi birds seemed to help him catalogue his own thoughts, instead of just stifling them away. 

He brushed Mathias’ bangs out of his face to admire the way sleep smoothed the creases between his brows, even as his own brows furrowed with emotion. 

They were so different. The notion gnawed at his psyche like a puzzle he couldn’t solve, but needed to. He knew he would probably spend the rest of the night lying there, rearranging the rough and mismatched pieces of their lives so they fit together irrefutably. _Inextricably._ The way the green mountains tumbled downward, and the sea stretched up with its highest tides to meet them at the shore…

He lost himself in some convoluted domestic fantasy for so long that the birds began to sing beyond the shutters. Flynn felt the pair of swallow-swifts on his collarbones like twin echoes of Mathias’ kiss. 

_I’d cover this salty canvas of mine in a whole bloody murder of crows for you..._

In pale grey light, words had a strange way of feeling like vows. 

**Author's Note:**

> Nobody: Hey ice, what type of fic would you like to write next? Angst? More fluff? Smut?  
> Iceporcupine: ...  
> Nobody: ...  
> Nobody: Hey! Wait! No! Don't you dare---  
> Iceporcupine: *knocks over large vase of terrible bird jokes*  
> Iceporcupine: .... I'll see myself out. 
> 
> \---- 
> 
> I maybe spent too long staring at monoidea's [ridiculously gorgeous artwork](https://monoidea.tumblr.com/post/642243324395372544) and it turned into an 11 part fic outline? I hope that's okay... 
> 
> This is also by far the most nsfw thing I have ever posted to the internet so uh... please be gentle with me. o_o


End file.
